SMOKED OUT!

If you do not receive a response to a ping, or if the response is seriously delayed, you might like to take this as a warning. But who wants to ping all day? You need a ping-based monitoring utility like Smokeping.

The Smokeping monitoring tool is on the package list of many distributions such as Debian and Gentoo. And if you can’t find the package, the 200 KByte tarball from [1] is easy to install. Smokeping needs a few tools by the same author, such as RRDTool, Fping, SpeedyCGI, and a web server where it can display the results [2]. Smokeping uses a central configuration file that gives admins several useful examples. The configuration file is the place to configure the paths to the binaries and the web server. Things start to get interesting when you configure the alarm triggers, as Smokeping uses an extremely unusual but efffective format.

Too many cooks spoil the broth, they say, but it could just as easily be an ingredient that isn’t part of the recipe. If you can’t reduce the number of cooks, you have to take other steps to make your broth more edible.

If protocols were human beings, NNTP would be a kind and slightly confused person that always believes the best of other people – even if they drop trash in the mailbox. Postfilter gives NNTP a watchdog.